It’s been way too long since I start­ed, but didn’t actu­al­ly fin­ish, the process of mov­ing all the old arti­cles on this site over into Word­Press. I got bogged down and didn’t real­ly fin­ish, so the site stayed half-done and sucky. Now I don’t know if I should even both­er fin­ish­ing. Part of the trou­ble is that those arti­cles are SO old that when I start mov­ing them, I get bogged down in updat­ing them and I end up rewrit­ing them, and it’s hard to fin­ish even one sec­tion!Read the rest of this entry »

I’m final­ly mov­ing for­ward with port­ing the Heart­song Hand­i­crafts site to Word­Press. It shouldn’t be a big deal. I’ve done the same many times before with oth­er sites.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I don’t have a logo. I mean, I have a sim­ple logo, but it isn’t very good. It doesn’t sing, that’s for sure. I just want a nice, sim­ple logo that isn’t ter­ri­bly busy, but that doesn’t look (like the first attempt) as if I made it from clip-art and stan­dard fonts. My utter and com­plete lack of draw­ing abil­i­ty is a seri­ous hand­i­cap in this endeav­or.

I did sor­ta cus­tomize a WP theme to match the crap­py logo, but that part is easy. The hard­er part is hav­ing some­thing to give the site visu­al inter­est, and that doesn’t exist right now.

On the oth­er hand, the cross-stitch pat­terns them­selves involve graph­ics, so I don’t want things to get too busy. It’s a bal­anc­ing act.

I may have to throw myself on Katie’s mer­cy, or some­thing. She’s pret­ty busy, though, and prefers to draw what­ev­er she feels like draw­ing rather than cre­at­ing some­thing to suit a par­tic­u­lar theme.

I’ve done so few kits that they hard­ly count. I think I have just about every pat­tern I’ve ever stitch, though. I wish I had pho­tos of all the items I’ve stitched from those pat­terns! I guess hang­ing on to the pat­tern is a mem­oir, of sorts, as I’m very unlike­ly to stitch most things more than once.Read the rest of this entry »

I sup­pose it could be called a Book­case Tree, because of its iasic deis­ngn. It wouldn’t be the best choice of design for sleep­ing quar­ters for a claus­tro­phone lke me, and pro­crati­na­tors wpuld find it even hard­er to quit read­ing and go to sleep. I would love to have this for a lit­tle one

I got through NaBloPo­Mo, as ridicu­lous as it was to com­mit to post­ing at least once a day for a month. So of course that small suc­cess has led me, in a moment of more-than-usu­al-luna­cy, to sign up for Blog365 (oth­er­wise known as “Out of the Fry­ing Pan, Into the Fire”).
The pur­pose is fair­ly clear: to post at least once every day of 2008. Feb­ru­ary 29 is a “rest day.” Posts may be writ­ten on any site, rather than stick­ing to just one blog, so I’ll try to spread them around on mine/ours. If I can’t get some­thing on the actu­al site on a par­tic­u­lar day due to net con­nec­tion issues or what­ev­er, I have to write (yes, write! like, cuneiform or some­thing!) a jour­nal entry and trans­fer it to a blog as that day’s entry.

It would be far sim­pler to have a sys­tem of some sort. Maybe I’ll cre­ate a rota­tion:

Ene­my of Entropy — here, of course, where I put gen­er­al stuff, book reviews, and the like.

Hope­ful­ly there will be new pod­casts up soon. There will def­i­nite­ly be more music, as we have that love­ly con­cert piano we received via freecy­cle all repaired and put togeth­er. It’s beau­ti­ful and sounds great! Not at all bad for one dri­ve to pick it up and less than $200 in repair fees! (Sam want­ed to just take it to the near­est autho­rized repair cen­ter rather than doing it our­selves.)

2007 wasn’t a stel­lar year, but nei­ther was it ter­ri­ble. Sam has a steady, secure job that he enjoys, in an orga­ni­za­tion that’s allow­ing him to advance. , Katie had a lot of health prob­lems, but I’m hop­ing that we’re on the right path to resolv­ing them. Shel­ley passed away a lit­tle shy of her 18th birth­day, but since we’d been told in 1999 that she only had a year (at most) left, we felt that we’d got­ten an “extra” 8 years with her any­way. Kioshi has grown into a nice com­pan­ion, too.

We real­ly kept to our­selves a lot through the past two years. When you’ve been betrayed and hurt as deeply as we were by our for­mer housemate’s sud­den crazi­ness in 2006, there’s a lot of heal­ing to be done. I don’t know if I’ll ever approach Thanks­giv­ing with­out trep­i­da­tion again, but we had a good one any­way. The stress did con­tribute to the dete­ri­o­ra­tion of my health, and that does make it hard­er to get out. We’re work­ing on it, though. We cer­tain­ly learned who our true friends were, and we’ll nev­er for­get that.

So on to 2008, which we hope to be full of more time with friends, bet­ter health, much more music, Katie spent last night and almost all day today with friends from the school she was attend­ing as well as her new beau. Sam and I spent the day gam­ing, upgrad­ing some web sites, eat­ing good food and watch­ing movies. If it’s true that what­ev­er you do on Jan­u­ary 1 indi­cates how your year will go, we should be just fine.

Accord­ing to http://ergoweb.com/Ergoweb, the mod­els, which are used in the design of the pas­sen­ger area of Ford’s vehi­cles, are “chunki­er” than pre­vi­ous mod­els, to allow for “a big­ger bel­ly and wider hips.”

The com­pa­ny rec­og­nized it is hard­er to sit in a car if the steer­ing wheel feels too tight, the seat seems a lit­tle too nar­row and there is not enough room for the legs.

What do you do with your charts once youâ€™ve stitched them? Do you keep them or dis­pose of them? If you keep them, do you orga­nize them in a way that is dif­fer­ent from the way you keep your unstitched charts?

I keep them. ALL of them. In fact, Sam has point­ed out that col­lect­ing charts should be con­sid­ered a hob­by in and of itself, sep­a­rate from the actu­al stitch­ing. If I could dis­play my love­ly pat­terns some­how, I would.

Next, I must Squee! For I’ve been asked for an orig­i­nal cross-stitch design for a book that’ll be pub­lished this com­ing year. I’m so tick­led! I’m not telling more than that, but it’s all pro­fes­sion­al and every­thing.

And final­ly, that was the impe­tus for anoth­er change. I’ll announce it in the next week. It’s a sur­prise for now 🙂